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Down for day: Google can be pretty forgiving. It will re-visit, and not penalise in the medium or longer term at all.
Down for two days: Yeh, you'll get away with that too.
Down for a week: Maybe. I've had a 4 day problem and suffered no ill efects in the long term.
Now somewhere beyond that, Google NAILS your site. Gone. As though it never existed.
Not unreasonable on the face of it, but what when you recover? What if you are down for a month, on for example a purely informational site (so you don't notice the loss of orders) and then you put the site back up?
Well I have a problem here. I have found that the site just doesn't recover, ever!
It still has the links and it still should be PR5/6... but it just isn't picked up. No, it can't be because it isn't found - it's in the ODP, Yahoo, and of course it is a PR5/6 in its own right.
Anyone know the score? Does Google tag it in some way as 'dead' after a certain period of downtime? Does it disqualify the existing links for it?
Any experience here? I'm not that keen to put this down as yet another site that Google has irrationally killed (adding it to the domain names I bought that seem to have had a previous life!).
Our host went down w/o a warning or even a whimper and dinna recover. Near on three weeks passed before we moved on to a new host instead of holding out hope (long story, many lessons learned, won't bore ya with it.)
We were live again early early May after repropagation occurred, and we've been going and growing in content ever since. In the last 24 hours for example, g-bot has been bunked out like we're the spider version of a 200 item buffet and all 8 legs are hollow.
So yeah, it's possible to recover. PR 5 index is back, with one internal PR 5, scads of internal PR 4, many of which were PR 2 or 3 not all that far back.
Good luck to you
Maybe 3 months now. The problem is that there is NO trace of it whatsoever in Google. I search on unique phrases on the index page, and it is still not there.
That would not even be the case for brand new sites with minimal PR, let alone one that has PR6 links from Yahoo and ODP and should be at least a 5 in its own right.
It certainly FEELS like the site has been penalized.
>> Early April '02, that was me... <<
I'm suspecting this is a relatively recent change. Maybe associated with the 'expired domain' wipeout of backward links, which was introduced earlier this year?
I could not believe it when a local ISP+host had their main server go out for 5 days (I am wondering if you were on it ;) does this happen that often?) Turns out their lead tech quit and he really was the only one that really knew how everything worked, so things fell apart shortly after that and no one could bring things back up. Not the sign of the most stable company. But what surprised me is most people stayed with them. Are people that lazy to research for a new host and move their site? Maybe they deserve the downtime.
98% uptime guarantee is 7 days of downtime (almost exactly). Is your host guarantee more than that or less?
But to bring this back to your question, all of the sites that were on the host I am talking about still appear in Google. Maybe they just missed the 7 day mark (if it is truly a 7 day week you refer to)
Does Googlebot visit your site? I would expect that it takes as long as a completely fresh site.
I didn't. But the downtime wasn't spotted for the reasons already mentioned above. That's a tangemt as you point out.
>> Did you do a search for the links? Still existing? <<
Yes, all of them. See above.
>> Does Googlebot visit your site? <<
It must do. This was a PR6 site with plenty of incoming PR6 links.
>> if it is truly a 7 day week you refer to.. <<
I never said that.
The questions actually are:
- at what point does Google totally drop the site?
- does anyone have any experience of this apparent 'penalty' for excessive downtime? Is there any known recovery route?
Sites disappeared on the 17th.
Still not in the SERPs.
I don't think it's a - how long you where down necessarily, but when.
If it’s when google does it link calculation (deep crawl) your…….
Have you tried using the [google.com...] page?
Kaled.
But it hasn't. I expected it to... but it's as though it doesn't exist at all as far as Google is concerned. Hence by suggestion that there could be some sort of penalty in play causing all incoming links to be ignored and the site thus eliminated.
>> Have you tried using the [google.com...] page? <<
That was the first thing I tried. No effect.
No... everything is fine. The site really is totally clean in every respect, except for the downtime.
>> What about doing something outrageous and put compeletly different content on your home page for a week <<
I made a couple of minor changes after a few weeks of it, but no change. It's not displaying ANY of the pages ont he site. Basically, treating it as if it doesn't exist.
On re-inclusion I've always been wary. It implies (OK, maybe I'm paranoid) that I have done something wrong and am asking for forgiveness. I'm innocent... at least this time!
I'm also sensing with the issue, that after a defined period of downtime, Google treats the site as expired, and acts as though the domain itself had expired.
In the light of all that, I've decided to simply buy a new domain, re-hash the contents of the old site, and start again. I've also recommended the same approach to a couple of other people I know who have the same problem.
I'll keep the original site going because it ranks well in other engines (as it should), but not for the first time, Google has forced semi-duplication through over-zealous exclusion (IMHO). I've suffered the same fate previously by innocently buying domain names that turned out to have a 'history'. Frankly I find it well over the top, but that's life.
